Generally, a file system may be accessible over a network to one or more users. When a user requests access to the file, the file may be retrieved via the file system and provided to the user if the file is not currently being accessed by another person. While the user is accessing the file, the file may be locked such that other individuals are unable to write to the file.
However, if the file is currently being accessed by another person, the file system server may determine that the file is locked and return an error exception to the user indicating that the file is currently in use. In this case, the user may be able to access a read-only copy of the file, and the server may return a copy of the last saved version of the file. However, if the user wishes to modify the file, the user may need to resubmit the request to access the file at a later time. This may require resubmitting the request several times until the file becomes available, which may result in heavy traffic across the network and at the server, as the server may need to process the request each time it is sent and return an error exception each time the request cannot be processed.